ANTONY GORMLEY: WITNESS: EARLY LEAD WORKS
White Cube New York is delighted to present ‘WITNESS: Early Lead Works’, Antony Gormley’s exhibition with the gallery.
April 23 – June 8, 2025
Representing a major breakthrough in the development of Antony Gormley’s visual language, the early lead works – initiated in the mid-1970s, and developed amid the protracted geopolitical tensions of the Cold War – stand among the most iconic of the artist’s career. ‘WITNESS: Early Lead Works’ reintroduces audiences to these seminal sculptures, tracing how Gormley’s early experimentations with the material laid the groundwork for many subsequent bodies of work.
The sculptures featured in ‘WITNESS’ trace the evolution of Gormley’s sculptural practice, from the utilisation of found objects to the incorporation of his own body, allowing for an interplay between emptiness and fullness, as well as a tension between the physical and the metaphysical. Together, the works on display serve as propositions for embodiment, vulnerability, space and presence. On the gallery’s ground floor, three early object-based lead sculptures – Land Sea and Air I (1977–79), Natural Selection (1981) and Seeds II (1989/93) – reconfigure the relationship between subject and referent, engaging in a critical enquiry that unfolds dialectics of creation and destruction, presence and absence.
The earliest of these, Land Sea and Air I, consists of a trio of lead-wrapped, rock-like forms, prefiguring its later, figurative iteration Land Sea and Air II (1982). The work originated from a single granite rock, discovered by Gormley on a beach along Ireland’s west coast, which became the form for the three lead cases that contain the titular elements: one enclosing the original stone, another holding water, and the third containing air. Extracted from their original site and sealed within lead casings – thus removed from the register of the visible – these materials undergo a transformation that, in Gormley’s words, transposes them ‘from substance to imagination: from matter to mind’.
Tucked into a corner of the gallery, Witness II (1993) – the work that lends its name to the exhibition – absorbs its surroundings while remaining self-contained, its form reminiscent of an ancient, seated scribe. Though enclosed, small openings at the ears suggest a body attuned to its environment – registering movement, sound and activity while maintaining a state of profound stillness.